


Glimpses of a man

by marvelous_echelon_8



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: I Made Myself Cry, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Nonsense, Nostalgia, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 01:19:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17376818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marvelous_echelon_8/pseuds/marvelous_echelon_8
Summary: Glimpses into the mind Of Steve Rogers, a man above a legend.This is the kind of depressive stuff I think about instead of sleeping.





	Glimpses of a man

Steve Rogers does have bad days. They might be few and far between, he still has them. It just creeps up on him in the middle of practice, or suddenly hit him when he's having a chat with Pepper. He had learned to live with it. He had always known the struggle, even back in the forties, even before he enrolled. Truth was, Steve Rogers might have been a good man: he was a tortured one nonetheless. Years later – because he refused to count the decades he spent in the ice, and that might have been part of the problem - Steve still remembered Erskine's speech: how a good man became a better one and a bad man just became evil.

 

Steve did not think he was evil, but there was evil in him. The devil was shaped as a thought, a glimpse of the past, a question for what was yet to come.

 

He thought he had seen it all: fended off Hitler, rescued Bucky, lost him again. But nothing seemed as hard as getting up on a bad day. Some days he just powered on, pretended like it was nothing; like he couldn't remember the endless hours spent in the gym, destroying one punching bag after another.  
Sometimes it was impossible to ignore this unfriendly voice yelling in this skull of his. No matter what he did or said, it was insufficient. That was the way his mind worked, and it was not news to him.

 

  
On his quiet days, when speaking happened in his mind rather than outside, Sam simply gave him knowing looks. They were quick glances, meaningless for someone who didn't know what to look for, but they all knew what to look for, they had been trained to notice. They observe but did not see, left it at that.

 

Still, Cap went on when Steve couldn't. When his mind got so loud he couldn't even tell him to shut up. Him. The voice inside him had become a person. A persistent presence at the back of his mind. He was unwanted but relentless.

 

Steve got better at faking it, but truth was, he understood why he felt like this. And it was so much worse. He couldn't turn a blind eye on his treacherous mind if he agreed with him. 

 

People called him old fashioned. Tony made fun of his inabilities with technologies – unfounded too, he perfectly knew how to handle an Iphone, and he got along with Jarvis just fine-. The jabs were meant to be cynical and probably an escape of some sort. Steve laughed it off. It was harsh, though. The joked were just fine, the constant reminder that he did not belong in this era was not. He was a man of the forties, through and through. Yes, he had found wonders in the modern technologies, and he wished so hard that they could have been discovered sooner, it could have spared millions of lives. It could have spared his mother or his neighbor whose smile always reached his eye. Nevertheless, he persisted. He was a man of the forties when people believed in their countries and laid down their lives to prove it, when children ran down the streets playing soldiers with fortune shield and wooden swords when coming home meant more than just going back to the suburbs for the holidays.

 

  
He was nostalgic, to say the least. He was missing an era which had done him no good, like an addict missing its fix. He had lost it all back then, shamelessly considered himself part of the selfless soldiers that were more than just men. He did not consider himself a hero, but he was a legend. He was a story parents told their children about: a childish Manichean vision of History.

 

He was a soldier, that much was true. History tended to embellish them as time went by. It turned them out into saints, whose lives now could be resumed by what they died for. Steve did not die for his country, but then he did. Everything that made him who he was now belonged to the past, he was a man of the past. The memories were unbearable. Fragments of his imagination came forth to haunt him. The idea of Peggy without him was as excruciating as the life they were robbed of. Her smiles meant for someone else still sent shivers down his spine, not as lovable this time around. Bucky's scruff rubbing against his shoulders when they woke up after his rescue or the delicate pinch of his nose when he found something funny: such were the precious things Steve lost to war. They remained as fond memories, something he yearned for but would never reach again. There were so many memories, too. And so many things he never got to be a part of. There were pictures he saw on photo albums, videos he saw on silver screens, but nothing could ever come close to being an actual part of it. Never did he get to see Peggy's tearful smile on her wedding day, never did he share a piece of pecan pie with Dernier, and he never got to see the Howling's Commando's reunion; as sad as it must have been. He missed the things he should have celebrated, the small days and the big events, the lazy mornings and pompous dinners. He missed Tony's birth, Becca's graduation, and so many baseball games.

 

  
But here he was, sitting at the kitchen island, smiling at Sam like he was living his best life. Bucky was at his side, but then he was not. Bucky was not Bucky, not the jerk from Brooklyn who hummed Edgar Hayes under his breath when he thought he was alone. He had the same face and smiled upon the same reminiscences, but they had not shared the same traumas. In all his complexity, he was, and that was sufficient.

Steve would never be able to experience the lives he had not lived, but he held his comfort, past, future, and present in the man sitting beside him, and somehow, for him, that was okay.


End file.
